6 in Family Are Found Slain in Home Outside Seattle

Thursday

Dec 27, 2007 at 5:12 AM

Six people were found shot to death at a rural home and investigators arrested two people they said were responsible for the killings.

SEATTLE — Six people were found shot to death at a home in a rural part of King County on Wednesday, and investigators arrested two people they said were responsible for the killings, law enforcement officials said. The victims included two children.

“We still don’t have a motive as such, but the suspects are known to the victims,” said John Urquhart, a spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Mr. Urquhart would not identify the suspects, but The Associated Press reported that one law enforcement official said the police had arrested the property owner’s daughter and her boyfriend. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the names, identified the two as Michele Anderson, 29, and her boyfriend, Joseph McEnroe, The A.P. reported.

The victims, members of the same family, were shot on Monday, Mr. Urquhart said. A girl, 6, and a boy, 3, were among the dead. A man and a woman in their 50s and a man and a woman in their 30s also died.

“Three generations were shot and killed,” Mr. Urquhart said. He did not say what led investigators to focus on the suspects.

Mr. Urquhart said that the suspects might have lived on the same property, which included a house and a single-wide trailer on several acres.

He said that the suspects arrived at the property on Wednesday while the police were investigating the scene but that they had not come to turn themselves in. “I don’t know what brought them here,” Mr. Urquhart said.

Several local news outlets reported that neighbors and friends said a couple owned the property; the man was an engineer at Boeing, and the woman was a postal carrier.

The property, about 20 miles east of Seattle in an unincorporated area near Carnation, was swarmed by investigators and helicopters after a colleague of the postal worker stopped by early Wednesday, saw bodies and called 911. A sheriff’s office helicopter was still flying over the property on Wednesday afternoon, “looking for evidence and anything else we can find,” Sgt. Jim Laing said.

At midday on Wednesday, Sergeant Laing said: “There is not a threat to the community. People in the community do not have to be worried.” Yet it was not until late in the afternoon that the sheriff’s office announced that the arrests had been made.

Brad Carpenter, a neighbor who shares a property line with the family, said that houses in the area were many acres apart and that he had not heard of any trouble until helicopters were overhead on Wednesday morning. Mr. Carpenter said he had had only brief exchanges with the man who owned the property, including sharing information about cougar sightings in the area.

“I pretty much stayed in the house today,” Mr. Carpenter said. “I kept the kids in the house.”

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